When love comes of age, serenity steps in
I looked at his receding hairline, generous middle, black forbidding spectacles and serious demeanour. Is he the person I married and who was a handsome young man with a ready smile? He was always the soul of courtesy who held doors open for me, steered me through the crowds and held my hand comfortingly on the footboards of buses. I went from friend to fiancé to wife in an easy transition and now, when I open the doors, the courtesy has long been replaced by peremptory instructions, a quick temper for anything and everything amiss.
He doesn’t remember anything I say, be it about the drycleaners or where my best sarees are overdue for collection or something as important as a wedding in a close relative’s family. The milk boils over leading to an overpowering smell that fills the drawing room, the favourite shirt can’t be found, there is no call from daughters far away. Am I responsible for everything? He leaves home saying he would be around the corner but after three hours I am make frantic calls. He says with an attempt at humour that I should learn to be on my own for at least for a few hours! What transforms these men from exemplary friends and fiancés to not exactly considerate or thoughtful husbands! All men are wonderful except those we marry.
Meanwhile, time has its own tricks up its sleeve and the magic and charm of the relationship have yielded a steady affection, a dependence and a taking for “grantedness” that rises out of a certain confidence. Even while ruing the loss of those days of undiluted happiness and the slow, imperceptible change that followed, I realise a serenity has crept into the relationship. Acceptance for better or for worse, a quiet concern for each other’s well being fills me with muted happiness, if not joyful exuberance. If the euphoria is over, the turbulence, the ego trips, and the small misunderstandings that morphed into stubborn differences, are also mercifully over.
Earlier where love meant eating out, going for movies, shopping sprees, social do’s and weekend getaways, it now means the peace of routine, mornings with just the rustle of the newspapers, the three-course lunch and the quiet camaraderie. Mornings have turned to evenings of our lives with the terrible uncertainties of the night. But the tranquillity of the sunset is to be enjoyed for the time it lasts. I remember a few verses from a poem “Grow along with me; the best is yet to be; the last of life for which the first was made”.
Email: sudhadevi_nayak@yahoo.com